Today marks the first day of the Report Stage of the Online Safety Bill. As this Bill progresses through the Houses of Parliament, we hope to (once again) raise the alarm around the risks to encryption posed by this Bill.
Is the bill mandate everything the runs(any program) needs to be decrypted by official? or just program offered by service provider?
Cause if it’s former, then good luck enforcing it as people can just compile and install “extensions” or alternate programs that aren’t from corporations. If it’s later, the corporate needs to open up the encryption by law, but they can also open source the encryption part and make it possible for community that use it to develop their own encryption extension.
I think our modern phone/computer has enough storage to keep more than life’s worth of messages. ie. I have photos/videos dating all the way back to 2009 on google photo and only consumes 11.5GB, with their compression of course. modern phone have 32GB/64GB/128GB storage by default. There really is no need for any corporation to store your “data”, you can encrypt your own things and then upload the encrypted archive to a cloud service for back up. With google reducing the storage capacity, you are gonna need to have alternative back up plans anyway. :)
I suspect it might be “decrypt this message, or you’re going to jail”.
Or just download the full fat version from an overseas server run by the company making the product. Expecting the general populace to compile stuff is a little bit optimistic. We’re talking about a country where most people don’t know what a socket outlet is called or the difference between desktop wallpaper and a screensaver.
You don’t need everyone to know how to compile, just enough to do it and can share the compiled one. Like some auto build daily release you can download from github. As long as it does not belong to a company.
As someone who has spent years extolling the virtues of Matrix/Element to family members I can assure you that there is no known rebuttal to the phrase “but I don’t care about privacy”. All it needs is to visit a site and sign up. No software required whatsoever. Good luck with GitHub and your ageing aunt or gobby nephew.
